According to the experts, the Tor network is currently composed of approximately 30,000 distinct .onion addresses that result active.
The spiders accessed websites in a total of 32 different languages, the vast majority of information on the hidden services network is in English, followed by German and Chinese.
Of the 29,532 .onion identified during the sampling period, only 46% percent could be accessed, the remaining part is related to C&C infrastructure used to manage botnet, file-sharing applications or chat clients.
“A total of 29,532 ‘.onion’ addresses were identified during the sampling period. Of these, fewer than half were accessible at some point during this period. The remaining 54% (which were not analysed further) were probably only up on the dark web for a very short period of time. This could be for many reasons: commonly that they were addresses relating to ‘command and control’ servers used to manage malicious software, chat clients, or file-sharing applications” continues the study.
The real surprise is related to the hidden services automatically analyzed by the experts, 48% can be classified as illegal under UK and US law. By analyzing manually a separate sample composed of 1,000 hidden services the experts found about 68% of the content to be illegal.
Below the percentages of content associated with each category.